EMILY RIMLAND: July 2008 Archives

Today was primarily about learning styles. I gotta say I love this kinda stuff too! I found out I am an Accomodater (the names don't really match the styles). The characteristics of an accomodater are:
getting things done (I just read a book with this title...that was the first give away)
Leading
Taking Risks
Initiating
being adaptable
being practical

What's more important than your own style (in this context anyway) is that you are familiar with the other styles and begin thinking about teaching to those other styles. It's natural that we teach to our own styles, but we need to keep in mind that others may not learn the way we do. So, the next natural step is to teach to all the styles, right? Harder than it sounds my friends! We did do a few exercises where we tried to stretch our activities to fit other styles, but it's challenging to fit all 4 into one activity. The important part to me here is awareness. I think it's half the battle. When your aware that other styles are out there and what works for them, you'll find ways to accommodate them, one by one.

The rest of the afternoon was spent on the broken method. This was an exercise where we were in small groups and were given an instructional technique of some kind and had to identify how to fix it. Everyone reported out on their technique and as a group we resoundingly confirmed that "It sucks!". Next we went back to the group and outlined ways to make that tool better. My group had orientations so the Open House got some shout outs (from me). Lastly we regrouped and discussed how we knew our assigned method was broken. Basically coming back to outcomes, feedback, assessment, and personal experiences.

My day concluded with dinner with an old college friend I hadn't seen in 10 years. It was a great mini-reunion and totally made my day!

Today was the first real day of Immersion (we had a picnic yesterday) and the name does not lie...we were immersed in all things instruction, teaching, and learning today from 8:30a-8:30p.

The morning kicked off with a reenactment of the 7 ages of information literacy...each immersion faculty member did a mini-skit that highlighted an age...from "reader's advisory (age 1) to "information literacy (age 7), they sang, they danced, they showed us their human side.(later we would call this their personhood)

The morning's sessions discussed the articles we had to read prior to arriving. At the end of this, we had to create a tag cloud of the important keywords that came up in the jigsaw discussions. Visual outcomes of our work are very important here.we do a lot of drawing with crayons, making posters, etc. It's definitely something I'm not used to, but I like it.

Next we watched a video called the deep dive from Nightline about the highly innovative company, Ideo. I've seen this video before but I can't remember where. It was good to see it again and frame it within the context of Immersion. The phrase "the basket is tyranny", which refers to the specific example in the video of how Ideo re-envisioned the shopping cart, really resonated with us and became the catch phrase for the day. Things like the "Tyranny of the 50 min session" and "the tyranny of the content" were bandied about quite a bit. It made us chuckle but at the same time reminded us to think outside the box. "Fail often to succeed early" was another good one we took from this video.

The afternoon was primarily about the concept of the authentic teacher followed by presentation techniques. Randy Hensley talked a lot about the affective side of instruction--your spirit, your humor, your enjoyment for the topic, what you bring to to the table that's from your heart. In teaching, your identity matters A LOT, but in our day-to-day teaching we often have a self-imposed rigidity..e.g. I HAVE to show them how to use the catalog. I MUST show them XY&Z all in 50 mins. I think we often box ourselves in because of our tools, the time restraints we have, what the faculty member expects us to teach...our own expectations of ourselves.
However, in our jobs it's important that we are indeed ourselves. We need to help students see the connections to the content we teach and remind ourselves that we are experts and that it's ok to reshape our instruction so that it's authentic to our style.

The presentation techniques discussion followed and centered around observing and being aware of our voices, bodies, and attitudes. The details are too many to enumerate here but I loved that Randy went into so much detail about these things. This is good stuff that you just don't get anywhere else! Later in the week, we will all give a 5 min presentation without props so that our cohort can give us feedback strictly on these areas.

These are topics we pretty much never talk about. It makes me wonder if pre-teachers get this kind of training. But I love the fact that librarians care enough as a profession to make this kind of discussion possible.